Fast and Furious car previews |

Car enthusiast website Edmunds has posted some sweet previews of many of the vehicles from Vin Diesel’s upcoming Fast and Furious.

Edmund’s interviewed the film’s picture car coordinator Dennis McCarthy, who also worked on Tokyo Drift, who told them that, while having 60,000 square feet of shop space to work in during production, he felt cramped.

“Reading the script, it was obvious this was going to be bigger than Tokyo Drift,” said McCarthy. “And a lot more of them were going to be specialty cars that we’d have to build ourselves.”

Producers decided that souped-up imports weren’t the way to go this round, and decided old-school American muscle, with a few of imports. But to decide which vehicles would make the cut and be featured in the film, McCarthy put together several ‘car shows’ in the parking lot of Universal Studios. Certain cars were a definite, in order to maintain continuity with the previous movies. That includes the black 1970 Dodge Charger from the first film, and the 1970 Hammer Plymouth Road Runner driven by Diesel during his cameo at the end of Tokyo Drift. I was stoked when I read that my first vehicle, a 1970 Chevy Chevelle (mine was a blue Malibu, this one will be a red SS), which was also driven by Diesel at the end of the first movie, will be making a return.

Other cars that will be leaving tire marks on screens in a fews include a 72 Ford Torino fastback, which will be driven by one of the main villains in Fast & Furious, Fenix. But while Widmann’s original is blue, the film’s art department had already assigned that color to the character played by Paul Walker. So for the movie, the Torino is green. Well, not actually “the” Torino but the seven Torinos built to portray the car through various stunts and scenes.

The article also reports that, in order to keep production moving forward at a fast pace, multiple clones of all the main vehicles had to be built. There were, for example, six separate Dodge Chargers built to portray Dominic Toretto’s (Diesel’s) black 1970. And with the supply of 1968-’70 Chargers severely depleted by all those episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard, they were among the most difficult cars for the production to find and the most expensive to purchase.